When Jefferson County PUD launched Washington state’s first retail fiber-to-the-home network owned by a public utility, it attempted to build a full-service offering for its rural customers from the ground up. Building the network was far more than just stringing hundreds of miles of high-speed fiber backbone; it was an entirely new way of doing business.

By mid-2025, the PUD had already been building its grant-funded, open-access fiber network since construction began in early 2023. With service technicians ready and fiber reaching the outside of nearly 1,000 homes, the utility began activating more customer connections. The first installations, however, highlighted an important reality: the physical network had been built at a breakneck pace, but the business systems that supported it hadn’t. As customer interest surged, sign-ups quickly outpaced the utility’s ability to process new connections.

The PUD’s broadband and customer service teams found themselves working across multiple systems to shepherd a single customer from service registration to service application to installation, provisioning, and billing. Every handoff required manual intervention. Every manual step introduced another opportunity for delay or error. The result was predictable: Installations moved forward at a crawl, documentation became fragmented, and fiber technicians spent valuable time performing administrative tasks instead of connecting customers. Rather than accepting those growing pains as inevitable, the PUD chose to rebuild the process from the ground up.

Finding the broken links

Like many utilities, Jefferson PUD relies on existing utility software to help manage service orders for its power, water, and wastewater services. In the spring of 2025, the team developed a process using existing software and an existing service order template originally designed for traditional utility services. The approach worked—but only technically.

Because broadband service differs significantly from electric or water service, staff needed to manually enter information at nearly every stage as customer information was copied between systems. Errors most frequently occurred in the billing stage. Early on, Jefferson PUD developed broadband service packages to address potential customer need. This led to service plans as finite as the “Snow Bird” package marketed to customers living in the area seasonally. The trouble came if, or rather when, a service plan changed. The smallest change in the fragmented system—such as renaming a package—created a ripple effect through the service order process all the way to billing.

Another early challenge was tracking any optional service add-ons, such as Wi-Fi extenders or the JPUD Connect app. Identifying the main service package and any add-on items for a home service stressed the capabilities of the service order template and led to billing confusion. The process created silos—not just between software platforms, but between people.

“We realized very early on that we weren’t just trying to connect fiber,” said Curtis Fryer, JPUD IT and broadband services director.

Fryer stepped into the broadband service pipeline in 2025 and worked quickly to correct course.

“We could see the disconnected business processes,” Fryer said. “We were midstream when our customer service team truly entered the equation, so a team effort was needed to continue onboarding new customers while simultaneously building the process again from the ground up.”

Breaking down the silos

Rather than searching for a single software solution, staff focused on something more fundamental: eliminating unnecessary work. The team brought together IT, customer service, broadband operations, and finance to map every step required to activate a customer. Each manual touchpoint became an opportunity to automate or simplify.

One of the largest breakthroughs came through implementing the online order management portal. This allowed customers to automatically create a service account while providing accurate, updated information and connecting the dots with existing utility services. Gone were the days of customers submitting forms through the PUD’s website and having staff manually recreate the information inside multiple systems.

Everyone grows together

Automation allowed each employee to focus on the work of moving the service through the steps as seamlessly as possible, and this meant empowering staff. Previously, fiber technicians in the field often became responsible for administrative work because they performed the last step in the process before service activation. They found themselves verifying paperwork and resolving provisioning issues instead of installing fiber.

“We took a long look at workflows and focused heavily on cross-training employees,” said Jennifer Dyrseth, Jefferson PUD IT manager and then-
customer service manager. “We have a very talented customer service team who fielded questions from new broadband customers but didn’t have the tools or responsibilities to jump in and help.”

Dyrseth said the team became stronger when they received proper training to field the more general customer questions. Giving customer service representatives better visibility into broadband accounts through the broadband management platform meant far less weight on the shoulders of the broadband team. The result was faster service for customers and better resilience internally. Employees developed a broader understanding of how their work affected the entire customer experience rather than just one step within it.

Small changes, big results

The improvements were measurable almost immediately. During the network’s earliest months, the PUD could only add six broadband customers during a one-month period between January and February 2025. A little over one year later, after streamlining processes, the utility added 153 new customers in a single month between June and July 2026.

Installation capacity also changed dramatically. A system that once limited technicians to one or two in-home installations per day became capable of supporting up to four installations per technician per day. Today, the broadband team routinely completes up to 50 installations each week.

The increased efficiency has also positioned Jefferson PUD to not only continue expanding as additional grant-funded construction areas come online but also work to stay ahead of the ever-looming grant deadlines it must meet.

Building systems that can grow

Along the path of bridging the service gap, the broadband team homed in on the importance of consistent documentation and clearly defined responsibilities. Standard operating procedures became essential to ensuring every employee followed the same process regardless of the department. The documentation helped clarify service step ownership and minimize stress for employees navigating a rapidly growing network.

“Building a system that can scale means thinking several years ahead and setting a realistic expectation,” Fryer said. “It’s really hard and stressful to grow if you’re only being reactionary and just solving today’s problems.”

Looking beyond utility walls

Not every challenge needed to be solved internally. The utility strengthened its long-standing partnership with NoaNet by leveraging NoaNet’s network operations center, which provides 24/7/365 support. Bolstering the NoaNet relationship allowed flexibility for the PUD to focus on construction and onboarding of new customers while NoaNet handled network monitoring and technical support for the growing customer base of Jefferson County. Additionally, Jefferson PUD and NoaNet partnered to complete a fully redundant path off the Olympic Peninsula to increase the reliability of the service. It became another example of building bridges—not only between departments, but between organizations.

A bright future

Jefferson PUD’s broadband journey is still underway. Financial projections indicate the retail broadband system is on pace to achieve positive revenue in 2027. Within grant-funded areas, the PUD has the ability to serve approximately 3,000 broadband customers, which it hopes to do by the end of 2028. Those goals would have been difficult, if not impossible, to achieve using the utility’s original processes.

To Fryer, one of the biggest takeaways in standing up a successful broadband utility and helping it find its rhythm is being open to bridge the gaps between departments, software, and people.